Not Your Father's Magic
by Shotaphile
Summary: DCMKHP Crossover; Kaito centric “You’re special Kaito.” His mom said, cupping his face with her hands and pressing a kiss to his forehead. “You and your father both.”
1. Security

**Pairings: **... considering he's seven right now, I'll have to say that I'll get back to you on that. Any request pairings for the future will be taken under advisement though.

**Warnings: **Toichi's death. A stark, unromanticised (what do you mean that's not a word? don't listen to my spell check, it thought laving wasn't a word either.) portrayal of the Fae. THIS ISN'T TINKERBELL FOLKS.

**A/N: **This is a multiparter that will span the length of the Harry Potter series and most of the Magic Kaitou one as well (during the holidays). I honestly have no idea why I started this thing except that Harry Potter always lends itself well to crossovers and the fact that I'm weak to them. I've got a few scenes plotted out, and a few points that I'd like to make, but otherwise I'm just running free with it, so any thoughts or suggestions are totally welcome. Please let me know how I'm doing~

* * *

**Security**

* * *

Kaito began to hear the whispers shortly after his father's death.

It was an eerie, layered sort of hiss – neither male nor female – cruel and loving at the same time, promising him the world and then threatening to end it. He couldn't sleep at night. He grew anxious if he didn't have a wall to his back, avoided rooms with mirrors because he saw shadowy figures, trapped and snarling beneath the glass, and when they opened their shapeless mouths the whispers turned to screams.

His mother found him curled up beneath his bed, shaking like a leaf and tears dried upon his cheeks. It was the first time he had cried since his father's death.

The voices grew slightly hushed when she wrapped her arms around him.

And here is where Kaito faced a dilemma. Whereas his emotionally vulnerable, seven year old mind felt entirely justified with the idea of clinging to his mother's side like a limpet for all of eternity, the cold, logical side of him that had been subtly coached by his father ever since he was big enough to palm a coin understood that this was an impossible vision.

"You're special Kaito." His mom said, cupping his face with her hands and pressing a kiss to his forehead. "You and your father both." And then she took him by the hand and led him to her bedroom, sat him on her bed and dug a small wooden box from her dresser drawer. She set it on his lap and brushed the hair out of his eyes with the back of her hand.

He opened it. "What's it for?" He said, pulling out a necklace made of finely crafted silver and iron. The whispers stopped completely as soon as he touched it.

She took it from his hands, placed it gently around his neck. "It's your security Kaito." She said, and kissed him again on the forehead. "Don't ever take it off unless I tell you to, do you understand?"

Kaito understood.

He didn't take the necklace off again until he was eleven years old.


	2. Letter

**Pairings: **... considering he's seven right now, I'll have to say that I'll get back to you on that. Any request pairings for the future will be taken under advisement though.

**Warnings: **Nothing at all...?

**A/N: **This is a multiparter that will span the length of the Harry Potter series and most of the Magic Kaitou one as well (during the holidays). I honestly have no idea why I started this thing except that Harry Potter always lends itself well to crossovers and the fact that I'm weak to them. I've got a few scenes plotted out, and a few points that I'd like to make, but otherwise I'm just running free with it, so any thoughts or suggestions are totally welcome. Please let me know how I'm doing~

* * *

**Letter**

* * *

Kaito had been eleven for precisely two hours twenty three minutes when a large brown barn owl flew in the through the open window instead of his father's dove. His mother looked almost as if she had expected it, hand outstretched for the sealed letter it dropped into her hands, before somehow managing to wheel about in the small space and back out the window without smacking either of them in the face with its wings (though Kaito did find more than a few tiny white down feathers littered throughout his hair later that day).

"Good news Kaito," His mother said as she broke the seal on the letter and handed it over for Kaito to read. "You've been accepted at my old school!"

Kaito read in silence. He was thankful at once for his impetuous to study ahead in English on his own, because that's what there was, and a lot of it. He read it twice, just to make sure he had the meanings right and then sat quietly at the kitchen table, contemplating the content of the letter he'd just been given. "… mom? When they say 'witchcraft and wizardry'… they don't mean like dad, do they?" He finally said.

His mother gathered him close, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and winking in a roguish manner that Kaito had seen his dad use many times onstage, whenever he felt that he was letting the audience in on a secret. Somehow it suited her. "You didn't think your father was the only one with magic, did you Kaito?"

Touché, Kaito thought. What he said though was, "Scotland, huh? Aoko's gonna kill me."

She didn't, but it was a near thing.


	3. Scottish

**Pairings: **Smushy BFFL moment between Aoko and Kaito because, let's face it, they're extremely cute - but still, _eleven_, and just because I'm weak to the two doesn't mean that the projected pairing is set either. Any preferences, let me know, anytime!

**Warnings: **A bit of cartoon level violence, gratuitous use of a tennis racket (not like that you perverts), and a strange foreigner speaking to elementary school kids in front of the gate O_o

**A/N: **This is a multiparter that will span the length of the Harry Potter series and most of the Magic Kaitou one as well (during the holidays). I honestly have no idea why I started this thing except that Harry Potter always lends itself well to crossovers and the fact that I'm weak to them. I've got a few scenes plotted out, and a few points that I'd like to make, but otherwise I'm just running free with it, so any thoughts or suggestions are totally welcome. Please let me know how I'm doing~

* * *

**Scottish**

* * *

"But you don't even _speak_ Scottish Kaito!" Aoko declared with absolute conviction, set beside Kaito on his bed and kicking her feet like she was kicking at the strangers who dared try and take her childhood friend from her.

Kaito inched subtly across the blue and white bedspread, eyeing her scissoring legs warily; even at eleven, the power Aoko could pack in that tiny frame when she was riled enough was lethal. "They don't speak Scottish there." He said, laughing lightly and leaning in just near enough to tuck a stray piece of hair behind her ear. "It's only technically in Scotland anyway, just over the border. It's an English based school." His voice took on a high, lilting tone on the word 'English,' affecting a strange, rounded sort of accent that a pale haired foreigner from Camden had spoken to Kaito with once years ago just outside the school gates, asking for directions.

(It had delighted him then, eight years old and still struggling with his L's and R's, and he'd played with the sounds until he could mimic back word for word what the tourist had said to him that day, though it would take him another two months to manage the whole thing without once slipping back into his child's falsetto.)

Aoko wrinkled her nose in distaste. She knew a bit more English than the average girl her age, thanks to Kaito's frenzied studies and his mother's patient guiding hand, and her penmanship was better than Kaito's, but the idea of attending a school somewhere they spoke it constantly was absolutely ridiculous to her ten year old mind. "But why do they want _you_?" She insisted. "What's wrong with the kids in their country that they've gotta steal 'em from ours too?"

"…mom went there." Kaito explained, without still telling her the complete truth, something he'd started doing to her with more and more frequency ever since they'd sat in the front row of that auditorium four years ago and watched his father die.

"Well where did your dad go to school? Why can't you go there instead?"

Unthinkingly, Kaito's hand drifted up to rest on the chain around his neck. He could feel his pulse hum – no, _sing _– just beneath the skin's surface. "I don't know." He finally said in answer to both, casting his eyes down and his voice low in distraction.

Aoko's voice was a soft dove's coo in his ear. "You'll write to me, won't you?"

The English word "_Duh,"_ sprung to Kaito's lips as easily as the tennis racket sprung from the floor space under his bed into Aoko's hands, as easily as he sprung from the bed as she swung, ducking to avoid decapitation (or just an oddly shaped bruise on his cheek). "Ahouko." He added affectionately as he flew down the stairs, like he had wings on his feet, and out the front door.

"Bakaito." She responded in kind, after she'd finished introducing his face to the sidewalk out front.

What he really meant was: I'll write every day. What she really meant was: I'll wait.


	4. Floo

**Pairings: **Tiny mention of Aoko, but nothing else besides.

**Warnings: **A healthy amount of scepticism when faced with floo transport for the first time, and a terribly attempt at conjugating it (did they ever, in the books? I can't recall.), some humor based on the European witch burnings, may bad, J.K. did it first, yes?

**A/N:** Borrowed that bit from the first book where Harry was reading about the witch burnings before school started, yes? The one with the tickling enchantment or whatever it was called. Because Kaito would not just walk into a fire without kicking up a fuss about it first. And that first landing after a floo is always killer.

* * *

**Floo**

* * *

The school was, of course, in Scotland and of a primarily English vernacular and, according to his mother, European and Asian witchcraft were of an entirely different sort from one another and you simply couldn't get the proper school supplies anywhere in Japan. _And taking a plane flight just to do a bit of shopping is a tad silly, don't you think Kaito?_So they were going to 'floo' there, which apparently wasn't at all silly despite a name that would certainly suggest otherwise; and what was involved in flooing – flooming? – again?

"You have _got_ to be kidding me."

The fire crackled at Kaito's back, warm and inviting, but not quite so inviting that he was willing to toss himself into it like a spit roast. His mother didn't stop to look at him or answer as she tossed a small pinch of some kind of green powder into the fire which flared up and flickered strangely in the bit of light seeping in through the curtains.

He took a step back. "I've only just learned about all this stuff mom, isn't it a bit early to start with the witch burnings?" Kaito tried again to get her attention and then, curiously, took two steps forward. Maybe it was because he'd just come from outside, running about with Aoko and trying to make her forget that he would be gone come September, but the fire didn't feel very warm.

His mother's hand settled comfortingly on his shoulder. "Don't be silly Kaito." She said, laughing; a light, tinkling sound. "They almost never burned actual witches back then. We were all far too clever to be caught out."

"Don't see anything clever about walking into a fire on our own." He said sullenly, but allowed himself to be lead to the mouth of the fireplace regardless.

Ten seconds later he was crouched over a cobblestone fireplace, spitting up soot and dust and giving his mother (who had somehow managed to come out of the whole thing looking just as neat as when she'd gone in and, perhaps, just a little bit amused) the darkest look he could manage whilst looking like some sort of ragamuffin chimney sweep. "I think I would have preferred the burning." He said.


	5. Vault

**Pairings: **Nothing yet; requests will be duly considered!

**Warnings: **Ummmm... trying to logic out the mechanations of a magic bank?

**A/N: **I honestly shudder to think of Kaito's mom ever letting Toichi come to Gringotts with her, but Kaito's still at the age and life experience where anything beyond "borrowing" something from a classmate as a prank wouldn't even occur to him, I think (at least, he never showed any inclination towards theft before discovering his dad's workroom). Are there any requests for what shops to see him in next? The wand shop is a given, obviously, but beyond that?

* * *

**Vault**

* * *

"Some sort of biogenetic lock, maybe?" Kaito mused as he watched a – goblin was what his mom had called it, and he rather thought that the unpleasant creatures did look a bit like – stroke the vault face with one long, gnarled finger and disengage a series of hidden locks, sliding open the large metal door with astonishing ease. "With internal, pressure sensitive plates; probably a different pattern for each door."

His mom hummed at his side, still a bit green from the journey down but appearing to attempt to try and find peace within. "It would certainly be an interesting challenge, but there's nothing honorable about stealing from a family's vault, dear, even one with galleons to spare."

Kaito tilted his head up to give her a curious look. "Steal?" He repeated back to her softly (their goblin tour guide seemed to be awful busy pretending the two of them didn't exist, but that didn't mean that he'd take all that kindly to talk of a bank robbery if he heard them), a bit thrown by the strange non sequitur. Who had said anything about stealing?

"Hm?" She seemed to shake herself out of a daze, staring down at Kaito as though seeing him for the first time. The fingers of her left hand stretched out to stoke lovingly at the side of his neck, just where the necklace chain peeked out from his shirt collar before retreating to tuck neatly back into her lap with the right hand. "I'm sorry Kaito, my mind was somewhere else for a moment there. Now why don't you get up there and fill a bag so we don't keep our handsome-" The goblin scowled meaningfully at her. "-friend here waiting any longer than we already have. We've got a lot of shopping to do, after all!"

Kaito nodded and scrambled up out of the adapted mine cart, setting to filling the supplied velvet bag with the strange little coins littered about the vault like so much refuse. He listened carefully to the distant bestial roar further down the track and could barely suppress a little shiver of delight. Wizarding banks were about ten times cooler than normal banks.

After all, he told himself as he climbed back into the cart and prepared for the nauseating trip back, here there be dragons.


	6. Coffin

**Pairings: **More tiny allusions to Aoko; requests will be duly considered!

**Warnings: **Strange imagery, fatalistic thinking... a little bit more about the voices. Sexual harassment via tape measure?

**A/N: **At first I was worried about this one being too short, but suddenly it's longer than any of the other ones, I don't know. Kaito's on a thinking binge, apparently. And no, I don't know where all the imagery came from. But, uh, it's fine, right? Are there any requests for what shops to see him in next?

* * *

**Coffin**

* * *

"Wand arm?"

Kaito shrugged his shoulders and spoke barely above a whisper, somehow unwilling to disturb the strange, muffled stillness of the first shop that his mom had led him too. It was like being in a mortuary, and all the long, thin boxes along the far wall were little miniature coffins. He fiddled with the askew lid of one near his hand, but his wandering thoughts had suddenly left him loathe to actually see what was in any of them and he quickly drew his hand back to his side. "Either. I guess."

The shopkeeper studied him like he was some sort of specimen, a butterfly stretched out on a pin board. Kaito quietly chewed his bottom lip ragged and shuffled his feet. His mother made a reassuring noise behind him, no real consonants or vowels, just sounds, but Kaito took a deep breath and forced himself to relax. "Ambidexterous?" The old man said, and turned to scan a few shelves behind him as the hovering – _literally_ – tape measure continued to take increasingly inane measurements. "Learned or natural?"

"Learned." Kaito agitatedly batted away the tape with one hand, scowling faintly. He wasn't about to just let not-so-inanimate objects sexually harass him, no matter the disapproving look his mother was no doubt shooting the back of his head for being disagreeable(he refused to turn around and confirm it).

The man nodded and glanced over a few more stacks.

"He wears iron. And silver." His mom spoke up behind him, and Kaito was so busy shooting his mom a look that he almost didn't catch the one that the shopkeeper was shooting him; eyebrows disappearing high up into his hairline, lips pressed thin.

"Intriguing." Was all the man said, and dug around in one dark and dusty corner of the shop for a special kind of miniature coffin.

_What._ Kaito wanted to say. What did that mean, besides an end to the whispers? Mom had told him to keep the necklace a secret, but as he'd grown older and learned about schizophrenia and other terrifying psychosis that included venomous voices firing along the synapses of your brain, he'd thought it had something to do with that.

He touched the necklace reassuringly as he was handed a long, thin, dark piece of wood – a wand, and Kaito almost wanted to laugh when he'd read it off the shopping list – and something murmured softly in the back of his mind. Not the angry, ugly words from his childhood nightmares, hissing and spitting and possessive, vitriolic, sinister threats, but soft, warm, loving. His mom's breath on the back of his neck, his father's hand in his hair, Aoko's fingers wrapped tight around his own. The breath he hadn't realized he had been holding escaped with a soft "oh," as he looked up into Ollivander's smiling eyes.

"One wand for every wizard." He repeated from the first moment Kaito had stepped cautiously into the shop, sounding quite pleased with himself.

It was a bit like stepping out into the sun. Kaito hadn't realized he'd still been holed up in the dark until then.

It was a nice surprise, as things went.


	7. Small

**Pairings: **None.

**Warnings: … **Kaito potentially plotting future mischief?

**A/N: **I couldn't resist the short comment after looking up the average height of eleven year old boys in Japan versus those in the UK – about a six inch difference, poor thing, this isn't going to be the last time he hears something about it. I tried to post this yesterday, as per my promise, but ffn was acting up again so...

* * *

**Small**

* * *

The next stop was Madam Malkin's Robe shop for his uniform.

Robes, Kaito thought despondently as he trudged into the next shop, skirting another sullen look across to his mom through his eyelashes (who was steadfastly ignoring him, as she always did when she felt he was sulking like a child). They actually wanted him to wear _robes_ at this school. How did anyone expect him to be able to run in something like that?

"They don't." His mom had explained patiently to him the first time he'd bothered to read the supplies list. "Kaito, I feel just awful having to be the one to tell you this, but the purpose of school is to learn, not to go looking for trouble."

"I don't go _looking_ for trouble." Kaito had protested. "I run _away_ from it. And I can't do that if I can't _run_."

"I'm sure you'll figure out something." She'd said.

Which, yes, of course he would, there was no denying that, if only for necessity's sake, but it would take a bit of _creativity_ on his part. But then, no one had ever accused Kaito of being predictable either.

It must have been a slow day, because he was beset by the shop owner almost as soon as he entered, taking him by the arm and hustling him deeper into the shop, fussing thoughtlessly with his hair, trying in vain to smooth it down. "Hogwarts dear?" She asked him kindly and then, pausing to give him a long, deeply probing look, frowned. "Are you certain that you're old enough to be attending, only, you're so _small_…"

Behind him, his mother coughed loudly to cover up a sudden bubble of laughter at his expense.

Kaito sighed.


	8. Limits

**A/N: **It's a pity, really, because with Kaito's later love of sleep gas and smoke bombs he'd probably love being let loose in an apothecary but, um, the sacrifices you make for being different? Next chapter Kaito finally _meets_ someone(s)! Any guesses on who? (It's very likely not who you think it is, whoever that is.)

* * *

**Limits**

* * *

Kaito started sneezing just as soon as he entered the apothecary. Which was for the best really, as, had he the breath to he would have very likely began quoting Romeo and Juliet for lack of anything better to do, and mom had warned him more than once that mentioning poison in public was almost sure to cause a panic.

"A bit like shouting _FIRE!_ in a crowded movie theatre." She'd told him once (and perhaps the fact that he had to make such timely distinctions as 'once' suggested that he might have overused the reference, but only slightly; it was a classic after all) which Kaito thought was just silly, really, who would do a foolish thing like that unless there actually was one?

Curious, he'd asked Nakamori-san about it the next time he'd been by at their house, and learned quite a few interesting words and phrases that he knew better than to repeat around his mom _ever_.

A lot of people, apparently.

As it was, he sneezed fitfully at his mother's elbow for a full minute, eyes red and watering, and drawing more than a few curious stares in his state before mom took him firmly by the shoulder and led him quickly back out of the shop and into the relatively fresh air, rubbing his back in small, soothing circles until he'd managed to catch his breath again. Half bent over and forcing himself to take deep, even measured breaths, Kaito rubbed viciously at the moisture clinging stubbornly to his eyelashes and took the opportunity between one breath and the next to quietly pull himself back together. "I am not…" Kaito coughed, straightening and taking a step back away from the shop, nearly bumping into a passing elderly witch with an armful of packages (complete with hopelessly pointy hat) but managing to skirt around her at the last minute and getting a distracted, slightly harried smile for his trouble. "… going back in there." He finished, trying to look firm, but mostly coming off as pleading.

"Of course not dear." She said in a very 'don't be silly' tone and taking a step forward to smooth down his hair behind one ear, smiling dotingly down at him until he couldn't help but smile back up at her for it. "You'll wait out here while I go back in to get your supplies. And once we get back home we'll take out the items one by one and see which, if any, bother you."

"And, what, you'll write the school a note?" Kaito asked, frowning slightly at the thought. Like a note in gym for anemia, sitting out and being excluded and garnering exactly the wrong sort of attention for it.

His mom stopped at the door to the shop, fingers just starting to curl around the handle and turned smile again at him over her shoulder; that short, flitting smile like a butterfly's wings that Kaito would sit in front of the mirror for hours to try and emulate just right (and people don't practice_ smiling,_ Aoko had informed him with a startled laugh that had quickly deteriorated into helpless, breathless giggles and gasps when he matched that pretty little sound, tone for tone). "Oh, I don't think we'll need to do anything so extreme as that, Kaito. You're a smart boy, you'll be able to figure out your own limit."

A small, handheld mirror in a shop window across the street caught Kaito's eye and had him ducking away reflexively, shoulders pulled up high around his ears and suddenly cold. His answering smile was filled with far too much teeth for his liking.

_Limits_. Kaito simply refused to let something like that define who he was.


End file.
